yay me

KHTML ♥

A picture of Oz Fox from Stryper I took ages ago. We’re rock stars.

So, after working on the cool “Large image displaying library” in KHTML I decided to look into other parts of KHTML, and work on getting my lolcat page working in KJS/KHTML. It turned out quite easy, KHTML is very friendly, both the code base and the community around it.

So, after fixing a couple of other small issues, I decided to take on Twitter which has stopped rendering properly in KHTML/KJS. Thanks to the excellent debugging support in the khtml kpart, it only took a couple of minutes to track the error down. The issue turned out to be that the maximum stack size in the KJS interpreter was too small, Twitter is serious about its Javascript. The issue is then if we should bump up the maximum amount of stack frames, since if we eat up all the available stack space we can get nasty crashes without Dr. Konqi (the crash reporting tool) showing up. But for now KHTML in git should render Twitter just fine.

Lastly, a tip if you want to debug production sites with long lines in KJS; turn on the “Reindent Sources” option if it is slow, the katepart embedded in the javascript debugger isn’t a fan of the long lines most websites put together.

And as usual, thanks to the KHTML developers for help with everything.

why is there still so much work done on khtml? shouldn’t it be deprecated in favor of QtWebkit? With Qt5 QtWebkit will also gain the V8 JavaScript engine, how could you keep up with this development speed?

I don’t know where you read that but it will not happen. Qt5 QtWebkit is still today based on JSC (JavaScript Core) and since it’s feature frozen and a first proposal to achieve it being somehow rejected then I think it will not happen. The fact that QML is using V8 is one thing, QtWebKit using V8 is another one. The V8 used in Qt5 is a fork that unfortunately is hard to keep in sync with what is happening on WebKit trunk with Google and V8.

…my idea. I love the fact that you’ve so ecclesiastically fixed these bugs. OTOH the fact that twitter was broken seriously bothers me. It’s not like it’s some small website somewhere far in the corners of the Internet that no body uses or cares about. Is KHTML really viable at this point, and how can this be improved for a better user experience? Thanks for your work and keep the improvements coming!

@ignore : no. For several reasons. First because the more rendering engines the better. If everything goes on webkit, we’ll end up in a situation similar to ie6 times.
Second : khtml has some great user features, such as assigning keyboard shortcuts to links (keyboard-only browsing!), for the lazy, it has continuous smooth scrolling (great while reading song lyrics/guitar tabs)
Third (and most important) : becaus people want to and like doing it.

Hi, thanks very much for your work in KHTML. I use Konqueror to browse the internet, i tried webkit browsers like rekonq, but i did nt like webkit. With khtml i have a better compatibility, spell check, better rendering (more reliable, specialy with the fonts). I think that kde developers have to continue the support and the developpement of khtml as is an engine in which the kde developpers can tune it to the kde desktop, fix a bugs, add features, without the need to wait an upstream decision. …Keep going :)

To those who, for some reason, believe development of KHTML should be stopped:

First, there are those of us who like Konqueror with KHTML. The fact that we are a small percentage is irrelevant. So are GNU/linux users in the world compared to mswindows. Would you like to be forgotten too, because of that?

And second, free software developers work on whatever they like, whatever motivates them. If you stop a free software developer from working on whatever he/she wishes in spare time, he/she won’t start working on whatever you want. He or she might just stop coding altogether, or start another project. FS developers do things like KHTML because they want to.